Facebook Wants To Make Everything You Do On Your Phone Social

Moments ago we published the transcript of our extended interview with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which he outlined the company’s mobile plans (it has some really juicy stuff, and we’ll be following up with more analysis). One of the interesting things Zuckerberg discussed was Facebook’s view of an optimal phone experience — one where your phone already knows who you are, and personalizes everything, including your installed apps, based on your interests and your social graph.

Facebook has already tried to do this to some extent on the web with its Instant Personalization feature, but Zuckerberg says that it really isn’t possible (at least, not yet) to personalize the entire web experience without building a browser. He hints that this isn’t the case with mobile — and that Facebook may be able to eventually offer a way to turn your entire phone social.

Here’s the relevant portion of our conversation:

Mark Zuckerberg: I think it’s different in different places. For example, take Instant Personalization. Our goal is to make it so there’s as little friction as possible to having a social experience. So you go to some apps, take Rotten Tomatoes, which we just launched last week. If people had to click this blue button to Connect, then some percent of them would, but it would be the minority because you don’t know exactly what you’re going to get before you click it.If you had to put up some modal dialog then that would be crazy from a UX perspective. But the fact that they can do that instant integration for the users that want it means that everyone has a good experience as soon as they get there.

On phones we can actually do something better. We can do a single sign-on if we do a good integration with a phone, rather than just doing something where you go to an app and it’s automatically social or having to sign into each app individually. Those are the two options on the web. Why not for mobile? Just make it so that you log into your phone once, and then everything that you do on your phone is social.

Michael Arrington: You’re turning on a layer…

Mark Zuckerberg: That’s what we’re trying to do. The reason I just gave that example is that some things, like the implementation is different on mobile.

It’s different on mobile than it would be on the web simply because it is not really possible. I guess maybe Google or Microsoft could have you log into the browser, but we can’t because we don’t build a browser – but, that is the basic strategy.